Mainsail Landing Demonstrator 1

[Galane]

Alan Aerospace Recycling & Packaging (AARP) presents pretty much as bare bones as it can get to put a single Mainsail engined rocket into a 70KM orbit then bring it back down and land safely. The small SRBs can be taken off and it'll still make it up and back down but with a very tiny amount of fuel left.

Some small hardpoints and I-beams serve to get the landing legs low enough to reach below the exhaust nozzle of the engine.

http://partsbyemc.com/pub/MLD-1.craft

Flight history. Four failed flights due to not enough fuel to make it to orbit. Two failures due to not enough fuel to land after reaching orbit. Two successful landings of the finalized design to prove the landing gear design. Flight program of this configuration ended and the design retired unless...

Our Kerbonauts are talking about how much fun it'd be to set a command pod on top. At least two of them mentioned the possibility of installing a stack separator and parachutes just in case something goes a bit off. Of course one of the others in the break room retorted "Parachutes?! You big wimp!" then another paraphrased our employee handbook "AARP doesn't trust our safety to flimsy pieces of cloth when the supporting thrust of rocket exhaust will do the job.".

First successful landing. Note the bare wisp of fuel remaining. This went up without the small SRBs.

Edited September 11, 2013 by Galane

[TheWanderer]

post pictures....

[Galane]

posted pic

[Rune]

Take out that humongous RCS tank and substitute with a tiny one, same for the battery and probe core, and you will have enough free mass to put a capsule and docking port in there. Substitute the mainsail for a skipper, and you will still have enough T/W, only your isp will go up and you will gain delta-v, perhaps enough so that teh capsule can be a 3 person one.

Rune. See how rocket SSTO's aren't complicated? It's all mass fraction and T/W.

[Galane]

Not the point of the vehicle. Its sole reason to exist was to design a simple method to make stock landing legs work with a Mainsail, which it does perfectly. I may take the struts off and see what happens.

If there was a way to stick extensions onto the footpads of the legs...

It's also not an SSTO. It has two solid booster stages which after the initial kick has MechJeb nearly shut down the Mainsail until they burn out, which saves plenty of fuel. Probably could stretch the fuel by fiddling with the ascent path but I figure if it it can get up there on the default MJ path a rocket should have plenty of room for optimization.

Edited September 12, 2013 by Galane

[BostLabs]

I like it! I have a fuel tanker that I like to return and land at the KSC (ok MJ does the landing) but it lands on the bottom of it's orange tank. I'll have to take it apart so I can put those landing legs like that on it.

[Galane]

Glad it's of use to someone.

P.S. AARP's Chief Engineer mentioned something about design royalties but our chief janitor and test pilot is one of those open source hardware geeks, he says since the parts are all stock items from other companies and all the engineer nerd did was bolt them together, there's hardly any "design" to it. Janitors, such a wordy bunch...

Edited September 12, 2013 by Galane